Twitter Is Art

For somebody who openly hates technology as much as Jonathan Franzen does, he's asked an awful lot about it. Just last weekend at the New Yorker Festival he was asked about the literary possibilities of micro-blogging. "Can Twitter be an art form? Toothpicks can be an art form!" he responded. First of all, there is some pretty decent toothpick art out there, which is at least an interesting use of a device that's been around for 1.8 million years. But what Franzen missed in his remark is that Twitter is far more than just another medium now. Not only is there definitely great Twitter art available; Twitter has become the last place where the avant-garde flourishes, where aggressive, weird, uncomfortable wordplay not only survives but actually achieves popularity.

"Can Twitter be an art form? Toothpicks can be an art form!" Jonathan Franzen #NYerFest

The most prominent example at the moment is Horse ebooks, which has only recently been revealed to be a work of art. It became a source of general fascination in the way that artists dream about: Audiences obsessed over whether it was random or not. It forced its readers to ask pressing questions about the nature of algorithms and comedy. The Atlanticdescribed it as "the most successful piece of cyber fiction ever," and they're right. But by no means is it the only example. By now Twitter constitutes a legitimate genre. Jennifer Egan wrote a story for the New Yorkerusing the Twitter form. Contests for 140-character stories are a regular phenomenon. And there are several writers who produce Twitter fiction all the time. My personal favourite is Arjun Basu.

The avant-garde has mostly disappeared from the world of the novel. Social realism, of the kind produced by Franzen and imitators, dominates the landscape. Similarily, the art world may pay homage to Duchamp, but everyone who knows, everyone important, concentrates mostly on money. Don't believe me? Damien Hirst is releasing an ABC book for children. That really says it all.

Twitter is a refuge. Though it wasn't designed for art, it fits neatly into the traditions of art's innovators. The French movements of the early- and mid-twentieth century were defined by constraints, by the limitations they placed on their own works. Sometimes those limitations were entirely arbitrary, as in Georges Perec's novel La Disparition, which never used the letter "e." Otherwise they were more general, like avoiding the cliches of novelistic character development. Twitter naturally operates with a limit; that's its gift. The web has no limit to how much you can say. Twitter forces constraint. That makes it a natural home for the avant-garde.

Which I think explains why this art is so popular. Anyone who uses Twitter even to do mundane things faces the same problems as an avant-gardist — they're in a new world trying to articulate themselves with means that are intentionally and somewhat arbitrarily circumscribed. Whether this limitation is enough to sustain new art for long is hard to tell. But what we have so far is at least a hell of a lot more interesting than toothpicks.

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